American Editorial Response to the Rise of Adolf Hitler

The general failure of American editors to respond to the gravity and urgency of Nazi antisemitism during most of the 1930’s— despite a constant flow of information from their own reporters in Germany ¹ and from various American Jewish organizations ² — must raise disturbing questions in the minds of contemporary historians. There is as yet no documentation to explain the widespread lack of interest in the plight of German Jewry as evidence of callousness, antisemitism or philo-Germanism. There is a more easily tenable hypothesis. The status of German Jews could only have seemed at the time to be peripheral to the outstanding controversies between Germany (and the other rising fascist states) and America (and the other depressed democracies). Moreover, most American editors failed to take Hitler and Nazism seriously until the late 1930’s. German Jews could not have become a serious concern for most American editors until the late 1930’s. The situation seems comparable to the failure of the American press to editorialize on the Soviet extermination of the Yiddish intelligensia and suppression of Jewish culture under Stalin. From an editorial point of view, there seemed to be more momentous points at issue between great and rival powers than the treatment of a foreign minority group.